Enterprise introduced many new races of Aliens for the series banking on the idea that there would be so many races encountered not all we need to be mentioned of, or seen again in the already existing Trek films and series,,, I guess in a Galaxy as big as Star Treks there would be countless discoveries of different races that you could get away with what this show did regulerly,,,, So today I wanted to show some of the designs for the Xindi’s ultimate planet destroying weapon in it’s underwater cradle from Episode #70 “Azati prime” . In case you haven’t noticed, it appears that if you are to design the ultimate battle station with enough fire power to destroy an entire planet,,, the chosen shape is round. .. Let me see know there was the Borg Sphere, the Xindi sphere, the chrome sphere from Star Man, the sphere from “Day the Earth stood still, and I believe there was a big one with a dent in it from some show called Star Wars….HMMMM round must be a bad shape. Anyways here is the first pass of the assembly station hidden under the sea. the idea was big and the technology was to reflect a submerged ship yard with multiple layers of cabling, lights, and construction vessels working round the clock to get this bomb ready for delivery to Earth. This first idea was brutally rejected, and stripped down to a few not so exciting simple frame work ideas. I believe Doug wound up finishing this one up and his versions also were taken down to bare minimums. So despite it’s 4F rating I still liked how it turned out and it now is a fav in my Portfolio.

When you were mentioning all those sphere ships, it made me remember how CFQ mag accused STARMAN of ripping off its finale from a really low budget flick called WAVELENGTH that also had a big reflective sphere come down as a spaceship at the end.

The ship in the first image is great, looks kind of like a whale, even having an eye-like indent.

It’s a shame the more complex ideas were rejected. Was it to save money on the CG modeling, or did they think a more simplistic design would make it easier to read, or maybe look more advanced tech wise?

Um, I don’t count this one though. The remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still, I so looked forward to, and even have the movie-poster hanging behind me, but it was kinda a let down. Hard to improve on perfection though.

I remember watching that episode on TV back in ’03 and seeing that Xindi superweapon for the first time and I was speechless. (though I did think of the Death Star a bit) You guys really did an amazing job on that show. Thanks for sharing more great concept art.

Man, this is one of those “if only” moments. For as much as the final product was impressive, this would have had some serious jaw dropping factor to it. I would have loved to have seen this design in the episode!